Thursday, September 21, 2017 <p style="text-align:justify">Surprisingly, not all folktales contain a villain--although sometimes a tale can contain more than one. But even when the story is populated by one or more villains, revenge is not always exacted from any of them--which makes them seem odd to those of us raised on Grimm, Perrault, or Lang.&nbsp;Revenge in German tales may involve evil-doers being burned at the stake, drowned, forced to dance in red hot shoes, or stripped naked and put in a barrel studded with nails and harnessed to a horse.&nbsp; These punishments are often described in even more detail than the good fortune of the heroes. Pontian narrators set things straight differently than do European ones.&nbsp; Punishment is not inevitable for villains and it isn't often through the use of their own evil methods, the way it so often is in other European tales. Where the villain comes to some bad end, it often happens because God has meted out &nbsp;justice&nbsp;or there were other natural consequences. If the hero or a helper undertakes the punishment,&nbsp;the description is fairly perfunctory: he may be chopped into small pieces, or he may burst from ill nature, or she may be offered the sword or the horse as manner of death. No one would say of Pontic tales to paraphrase Maria Tatar (when she writes in The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales about those German stories)&nbsp;that the villain’s dying in the most painful possible way is a precondition for the hero’s happiness.</p> <div>&nbsp;</div>